In May 2011, just over half of Maltese voters, about 53 percent, walked into polling stations on a small Catholic island and did something nobody expected them to do: they voted to legalise divorce. Malta was the last country in the European Union without it. By October of that year the law was in force. This spring, fifteen years later, campaigners and beneficiaries gathered in Floriana under the banner "15 Years of Second Chances" to mark the anniversary. One woman told the room her life had become a roller coaster, that she had finally married the man she loved, that she wanted to be a mirror for anyone still hoping.
I read that story and felt two things at once, and I am going to be honest about both, because anniversaries deserve honesty more than they deserve applause.
I hate divorce. And divorce saved my life.
Sit with that contradiction for a moment, because I have had to sit with it for years.
The wound that came first
Here is something people rarely admit: my parents' divorce hurt me more than my own.
I was an adult when it happened. Grown, independent, living abroad, supposedly past the age where these things reach you. That is the lie we tell ourselves about adult children of divorce. The truth is that when the two people who built your world decide to tear up the blueprint, the ground moves under you no matter how old you are. The house you grew up in becomes a disputed asset. The story of your childhood gets rewritten by two unreliable narrators. Christmas becomes logistics.
It traumatised me more than my own divorce did, and I say that as a man whose wife left him.
Because yes, that happened too. Years later, my own marriage ended. I filed in Texas, where the system is brutally efficient, and sixty days later it was done. Sixty days to dissolve what took decades to build. I lived through it. I functioned. And in time the Church examined the marriage and granted an annulment, and today I am deeply happy in a new union that has lasted many years and given me more joy than I thought I had coming.
So do not mistake me for a man throwing stones from inside an intact glass house. The glass shattered. I swept it up myself. I know exactly what the woman in Floriana means by a second chance, because I am living one.
And still I say: something has gone badly wrong with how we treat marriage.
We give up too fast
I am a believer in marriage. Not in the greeting-card version, but in the old, hard, load-bearing version: a vow that is supposed to cost you something. And what I see everywhere, across Europe, across the Anglosphere, is people treating that vow like a phone contract. Difficult year? Cancel. Grew apart? Upgrade. The therapeutic culture whispers that your first duty is to your own fulfilment, and everything else, spouse, children, promises, is negotiable.
People throw it all away too fast. Not the abused. Not the betrayed and broken. I mean the merely bored, the mildly disappointed, the ones who mistake a rough season for a dead marriage. Every long marriage contains years that feel like winter. The people who make it to gold anniversaries are not the ones who never wanted to leave. They are the ones who did not.
What the Philippines taught me
I spend a good deal of time in the Philippines. Our team runs operations in Davao, and I have come to love the country. And here is the fact that stops every European cold: the Philippines has no divorce law at all. It is the only sovereign country on earth, apart from the Vatican, where a married couple simply cannot divorce. Annulment exists, slow and expensive. Bills pass the House and die in the Senate. The ban endures.
By every modern assumption, this should produce a nation of quietly miserable prisoners. That is not what I see.
I want to be careful here, because it is genuinely hard to get to the bottom of how people really feel, and a visitor's impressions can be theatre. Perhaps I see the smiles and not the kitchens. I grant all of that. And yet the impression persists, trip after trip, year after year: couples there seem more content. Not giddier. More settled. There is a peace in Filipino family life that I struggle to find in Berlin or London, where every marriage lives with one eye on the exit.
I have a theory about why. When leaving is nearly impossible, the exit stops being furniture in your mind. You stop rehearsing the escape and start repairing the house. The energy that Western couples pour into wondering whether they would be happier elsewhere gets poured, in the Philippines, into the marriage itself, into the children, into the sprawling multi-generational family that gathers every Sunday whether you feel like it or not. Constraint, strangely, produces contentment. Commitment is not the absence of options. It is the decision to stop shopping.
And here is the part the reformers never mention: whoever truly wants to leave, leaves anyway. Filipinos separate de facto. They move out, move on, build new lives without the paperwork. The ban does not imprison the desperate. What it does is remove the cheap exit for the merely restless. It changes the default. And defaults, as anyone who has studied human behaviour knows, are destiny.
The harsh part
So would I ban divorce? I honestly do not know. I have turned it over a hundred times and I still do not know, because I have felt both edges of the blade.
But I will tell you where I have landed on one question, and I know how it sounds. Jordan Peterson argues that when children are involved, you stay. That the modern comfort, "kids are resilient, they just want you to be happy," is largely a story adults tell themselves to soften what they are about to do. The research on children of divorce, on outcomes in education, mental health, and their own future marriages, is not kind to that story. Peterson's position is that the vow you made became, on the day your first child was born, a vow to someone who never got a vote.
As harsh as it sounds, I agree with him.
I agree with him as a son who was wounded by his parents' divorce at an age when I was supposedly immune. Children do not experience your liberation. They experience the earthquake. They inherit the rubble and spend decades sorting it. If two adults have merely fallen out of enchantment with one another, and there are children in the house, then I believe the adult thing, the heroic thing, is to fight for the marriage with everything you have: counselling, humility, forgiveness, boredom endured, pride swallowed. Not forever in cases of violence or genuine destruction. But "we grew apart" is not a reason. It is a resignation letter, and children pay the severance.
I did not get to live that ideal. My marriage ended whether I willed it or not, because it takes two people to stay and only one to go. That is precisely why divorce must exist as law: no legal system can force a heart to remain. But there is a canyon between divorce existing and divorce being celebrated as a lifestyle upgrade.
Malta, fifteen years on
Which brings me back to this island I write about, and why the Maltese story is more interesting than either side of the old referendum will admit.
The anti-divorce campaigners of 2011 predicted collapse: the family shattered, the floodgates open, Malta remade as just another rootless European society. Fifteen years later, look at the numbers. According to Eurostat, Malta records roughly 0.9 divorces per 1,000 people, the lowest crude divorce rate in the entire European Union, against an EU average of 1.6 and Latvian highs near 2.8. Even after Parliament softened the law in 2021, cutting the long separation requirement down to months for couples who both consent, the floodgates never opened. The flood never came.
Why not? Because law is downstream of culture, and Maltese culture never stopped believing in the family. This is a country where the village feast still empties every household onto the street, where Sunday lunch is a standing appointment across three generations, where the parish church is not a museum but a living address. The Maltese took the legal instrument and used it the way a serious people use a fire escape: grateful it exists, in no hurry to jump.
And the pro-divorce campaigners were right about something too, and I have to concede it through gritted teeth. For the woman in Floriana who spent years without rights, without recognition, married in her heart to a man the law would not let her wed, the reform was not decadence. It was mercy. Second chances are real. I am holding mine.
What this means if you are thinking of coming here
Readers of Malta Unlocked are usually weighing this island as a home: British families, Irish, Scandinavian, American, people who want sun and safety and sane taxation. Here is what the divorce anniversary tells you that no brochure will.
Malta liberalised without dissolving. It gave its people the modern legal toolkit, divorce, civil unions, the lot, and then largely declined to use the sharpest tools. It remains a place where marriage means something, where children grow up inside dense webs of grandparents and cousins and neighbours, where the default is still to stay. If you are raising a family, that ambient culture is worth more than any tax rate. You become like the people you live among, and in Malta, the people stay married.
That is the paradox worth carrying home from Floriana's anniversary. The healthiest relationship a society can have with divorce is the one Malta has stumbled into: legal, available, and rare. A door that exists, in a house nobody wants to leave.
My life became a roller coaster too. I hated every drop of it. And I got off the ride into the arms of a happiness I did not deserve and will not waste. Both things are true. Hold your marriage like it cannot be replaced, because in every way that matters, it cannot.